1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for information sharing and knowledge management, and more particularly for server augmented harvesting community knowledge.
2. Discussion of Background Art
Satisfying information needs in a diverse, heterogeneous information environment is challenging. In order to even begin the process of finding information resources or answers to questions, individuals typically must know either where to look, or whom to ask. This is often a daunting task, especially in large enterprises where many of the members will not know each other, nor be aware of all the information resources potentially at their disposal.
Current systems for storing information and/or organizational expertise include Knowledge Databases (K-bases), such as document repositories and corporate directories, as well as Knowledge Management systems, which rely on users to explicitly describe their personal information, knowledge, and expertise to a centralized K-base.
FIG. 1 is a dataflow diagram of a conventional knowledge management system 100. In a typical architecture, information providing users 102 explicitly decide what descriptive information they provide to a central database 104. An information seeking user 106 then performs a query on the central database 104 in order to find an information provider who perhaps may be able to answer the seeker's question.
There are several problems with such systems. First, knowledge management systems, like that shown in FIG. 1, require that information providers spend a significant amount of time and effort entering and updating their personal information on the central database 104. For this reasons alone, such systems tend to have very low participation rates. Second, even those information providers, who take time to enter and update this information, may misrepresent their personal information or level of knowledge and expertise be it willfully or not. Furthermore, they may neglect or be unable to reveal much of their tacit knowledge within their personal description. Tacit knowledge is knowledge a user possesses, but which the user either does not consider important enough to enter, or which they may not even be consciously aware that they know.
Because of the inaccuracy and/or incompleteness of such personal information, information seekers, even after all of their searching efforts, may still find their questions left unanswered, perhaps because the “expert” they identified may not have the bandwidth to respond. Similarly, even information seekers who discover the existence of relevant K-bases may be required to formulate queries which are so complex that they either can not or will not bother to perform a proper search.
Other problems with such systems, are their lack of anonymity and excessive cost. Such systems do not enable the information seekers and providers to remain anonymous while performing queries or asking questions. As such, they may not perform a search, as a question, or wholeheartedly reveal their knowledge about a particular topic in their response to another user's question. Also, such conventional centralized systems require the installation of additional costly hardware dedicated to the knowledge management system, and do not make use of otherwise underutilized resources such as the user's own personal computer.
In response to the concerns discussed above, what is needed is a system and method for harvesting community knowledge that overcomes the problems of the prior art.